Excerpt：The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

http://www.zwbk.org/MyLemmaShow.aspx?zh=zh-tw&lid=222600
《崩潰》發表於1936年，是菲茨傑拉德創作的一部帶有自我剖析、自我反省性質的自傳性隨筆集。短短7篇文章滿是對時代的嘲諷，對友人的追述，對身處絕境的失望，把走投無路的自己暴露在眾目睽睽之下，任由别人嘲笑自己的失敗和堕落。

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html
The 1936-1937 period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in 1936 Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital. After Baltimore Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her surrogate family. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald functioned as a concerned father by mail, attempting to supervise Scottie’s education and to shape her social values.


http://www.esquire.com/features/the-crack-up
"The Crack-Up", by F. Scott Fitzgerald, as originally published in Esquire, February 1936.
(譯者：黃昱寧)

1936/2
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick -- the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
(毫無疑問，所有的人生都是一個垮掉的過程，但那些引發戲劇性場面的打擊——那些來自或似乎來自外界的巨大而突然的打擊——那些被你存在記憶裡，承擔著你的怪罪，你在脆弱的時刻會向朋友們傾訴的打擊，其效果的顯現倒並不突兀。另一種打擊來自內心——那些打擊，直到你無論怎麼做都為時晚矣，直到你斷然意識到在某些方面你再也不是那樣好的一個人，你才會感覺得到。第一種破壞似乎來得很快——而當第二種發生時你幾乎渾然不覺，卻會冷不防發現端倪。)
……
I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” -- and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills -- domestic, professional, and personal -- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
(我必須在“努力無用”和“務必奮鬥”這兩種感覺間保持平衡，明明相信失敗在所難免，卻又決心非“成功”不可——不僅如此，還有往昔的不散陰魂與未來的高遠憧憬之間的矛盾。假如我做到這點需要經歷那些司空見慣的煩惱——家裡的，職業的，個人的——那麼“自我”就會像一支箭一樣，不停地從虛無射向虛無，這股力量如此之大，唯有重力才能讓它最終落地。)


1936/3
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering -- this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary daytime advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream -- but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza -- one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality…
(如今，開給那些”沉淪之輩”的標準藥方是：想想那些真正窮困潦倒、身殘體弱的人吧——這是賜予一切多愁善感之人的全天候祝福，也是在大白天裡對每個人的身心皆有裨益的忠告。然而，凌晨三點，一包先前被遺忘的舊物就和一道死亡判決具有同樣悲劇性的分量，此時藥方就無濟於事了——在靈魂的真正黑夜裡，日復一日，永遠是凌晨三點鐘。在那個鐘點，人總是樂於躲進嬰兒般的睡夢中，什麼都不用面對，時間越久越好——可是，你又總是會被世上各色新朋舊友驟然驚醒。你盡可能匆匆忙忙、漫不經心地應付掉這些場合，再度躲回那夢裡，盼著憑藉某個偉大的物質或著精神的富礦，一切都會自動調節到順心遂意的地步。然而，隨著離群索居的持續，出現富礦的機率越來越小——與其說你在等待單單一種悲傷的消逝，還不如說在被迫目擊一道刑罰的執行，目擊你自我個性的分崩離析。)


1936/4
This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous “Escape” or “Run away from it all” is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person -- to be kind, just, or generous.
(這讓我想到，那些活下來的人已經實現了某種”決裂”。這是個分量很重的詞兒，當你既有可能被領進一座新監獄，也有可能給押回舊牢房時，”決裂”和”越獄”就不是一回事。著名的”遁世隱居”或者”遠離塵囂”其實是困在陷阱中的遠足，哪怕這陷阱將南方的海——專供那些想畫海或者想在海上航行的人享用——都囊括其中。而”決裂”則意味著你無法回頭；它無可逆轉，因為它使得”過去”不復存在。因此，既然我再也無法履行生活賦予我的、或者說我賦予自己的使命，那為什麼不乾脆把四年來一直在裝著追求使命的這尊空虛的軀殼殺死呢？我只能繼續當個作家，因為這是我唯一的生活方式，可是我不會有任何努力”做人”的企圖了——什麼善良啦，公正啦，慷慨啦。)